Ukrainian orphanage tried to hide children from Russians when the war started

A roar of artillery fire shook the ground as Olena opened the gate to the Kherson Children’s Home. She barely bothered.

Russian troops are positioned across the Dnipro River and Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, is under regular attack.

Like many Ukrainians during this war, Olena prefers not to share her last name. She has worked at the orphanage for over 17 years.

Olena said that she loved all the children at the children’s home, but was closest to Arkasha. “Of course, everyone has their favorite, but he was mine,” she said.

Five-year-old Arkasha’s locker is orange – with a sticker of a rooster on it. His name is carefully printed in Cyrillic characters.

Inside the rooms, there are paintings of bunnies holding balloons, floating in the sky; play areas for children; closets full of toys. In the rooms, clean cribs and tiny bunk beds with brightly colored mattresses.

But the 48 children who lived here are gone – seized by Russian officials during the city’s months of occupation.

“I feel empty, just empty. Everything stopped,” said Olena. “The children were happy. They had everything!”

hidden in a basement

When the war broke out in February last year, the orphanage staff came up with a plan. They took all the children, most under the age of 5, to the Holhofa church on the other side of town, Olena said.

The church and caretakers of the house kept the children safe and warm in the basement. They hid them to keep them safe from the fighting and to escape the Russians, Olena said.

Kherson was taken by Russian forces in the early days of the war. The invading troops moved quickly across the Dnipro River; it was the first major city to be taken and the only regional capital.

“Yes, the children were here,” Victor, the church’s 74-year-old caretaker, told the CNN . “But after the Russians occupied this city, they started asking questions.”

After a few weeks, he said, agents from Russia’s security service, the FSB, came to the church and demanded that the caretakers transport the children back to the orphanage. Caregivers felt they had no choice. And that was when Olena realized that the Russians wanted to take the children away.

“They kept saying, ‘These are our children,’” she said of FSB .

In October, Russian authorities informed the orphanage that they would be coming to pick up the children.

“They warned us to collect their clothes. The Russians called at night and said that we must prepare the children for the next morning. The buses arrived at eight,” she said.

Just over a week ago, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, stating that they were criminally responsible for the “illegal deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”. The Kremlin condemned the court’s decision.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently said that at least 15,000 children were evacuated from Ukraine. Human rights groups say many of them were coerced to leave their parents and taken to so-called summer camps.

In occupied Kherson, the Russians made no secret of their actions in taking children from the Kherson Children’s Home.

In fact, they widely advertised the movement and used it for propaganda purposes. Eventually, the incident could be used as evidence in a war crimes trial.

Shared on Telegram, footage from that October morning shows confused children being herded onto buses – away from their beloved caregivers.

Olena said the nurses wrote the children’s names on their jackets or on their hands – so that they would at least be called by their real names wherever they went. Organizers said they were taking them to occupied Crimea. It’s not clear exactly where they ended up.

Ukrainian investigators said orphans taken from occupied territories also ended up in Russia, where they were given citizenship and given to Russian couples.

“They don’t deserve our children. They should bring them back. They don’t deserve them,” said Olena.

falsified medical records

The Russians did not stop with orphanages, they scoured Kherson to take children. Russian collaborators and officials have repeatedly gone to Kherson Regional Children’s Hospital asking for a list of orphaned babies and children who should be taken, said Dr. Look Piliarska, a pediatric anesthetist.

According to Piliarska, hospital staff hid some orphans in the ICU basement and falsified the medical records of other children, indicating conditions such as seizures and fluid in the lungs.

She showed to CNN a ventilator like the one they put a healthy baby on, she said, and turned on some lights to make it look like it couldn’t be safely moved. Everyone was afraid of being found out, she recalled. Piliarksa and hospital administrators say they managed to save 15 children – three were taken away by Russian authorities.

“We understood that they would not forgive us for this. We knew there would be serious retribution,” she said.

A hospital nurse made such efforts to thwart the actions of the Russians one step further.

Tetiana Pavelko kept coming back to see a newborn named Kira, who captured her heart. “From the beginning, I really loved her. She was such a beautiful child,” she told CNN .

Pavelko pleaded with doctors and hospital administrators to keep Kira off the list of children that staff regularly checked.

“Every day, the list was updated. And they made that list twice a day. I made sure Kira was never on that list,” she recalled.

When Ukrainian soldiers retook Kherson from the Russians in November, Pavelko was allowed to take Kira home. She started the adoption process, she said.

She, her partner and Kira live in a single-story house in the Korabelny district, in the far south of Kherson. The neighborhood faces regular shelling from the Russians across the river.

But Pavelko says this terrible war brought him a gift.

“Kira means everything to me. Probably she is the meaning of my life in the first place. I don’t even know, to be honest with you, I can’t imagine my life without Kira,” she said.